Murder City by Charles Bowden Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields

Ciudad Juárez lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. A once-thriving border town, it now resembles a failed state. Infamously known as the place where women disappear, its murder rate exceeds that of Baghdad. Last year 1,607 people were killeda number that is on pace to increase in 2009.

In Murder City, Charles Bowdenone of the few journalists who has spent extended periods of time in Juárezhas written an extraordinary account of what happens when a city disintegrates. Interweaving stories of its inhabitantsa raped beauty queen, a repentant hitman, a journalist fleeing for his lifewith a broader meditation on the town’s descent into anarchy, Bowden reveals how Juárez’s culture of violence will not only worsen, but inevitably spread north.

Heartbreaking, disturbing, and unforgettable, Murder City establishes Bowden as one of our leading writers working at the height of his powers.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Murder City

Kirkus Reviews

GQ and Mother Jones contributing editor Bowden (Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future, 2009, etc.) digs into the complexities behind the ominous escalation of violence in Ciudad Juárez, a city across the border from El Paso that now has the tragic distinction of being the mos...

BC Books

Or, more precisely, because of the war for drugs, “for the enormous money to be made in drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share.”
As Charles Bowden, the author explains, the whole thing started in 2000, which was when Vicente Fox was elected president of Mexico.

Austin Chronicle

Pointing out that organized crime figures move about with impunity, that law enforcement on all levels has traditionally been allied with the cartels and now terrorizes citizens directly, that the U.S. in many cases trained and armed many of the city's spree killers, that not a single arrest has ...

My San Antonio

"There is a second Mexico, where the war is for drugs, for the enormous money to be made in drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between government and the...

rabble.ca

Certainly people are being murdered here at a horrific rate, but what the title "war on drugs" necessarily obfuscates, with its irritating and fundamentally meaningless pandering to bourgeois sentimentalities and anxieties, is that the war on drugs is really two things: a competition among differ...